The affective economy of feminist leadership in Finnish universities: class-based knowledge for navigating neoliberalism and neuroliberalism

ABSTRACT

Women leaders are frequently treated as one class – a homogenised group with essentialised skills and competencies in binary relationship to male leaders. We explore how feminist ways of knowing gender and leadership, and circulations of affects, shape women’s diverse leadership practices and identities within the neoliberal, and neuroliberal academy in Finland – a Nordic country with a sophisticated gender equality policy architecture. We debate the (re)production of social and material inequalities through epistemic injustice by exploring what possibilities are emerging from the assemblages and relational potential of policy interventions, global speaking back to patriarchal power, the revisioning of gender, and the inclusion of women in higher education leadership. Theoretically, the study intersects feminist affect notions, neoliberalism, neuroliberalism, and epistemic inclusion/injustice. We conducted 10 interviews with middle-classed women university leaders in five universities. They described how, in the absence of possibilities to facilitate major structural changes, they applied their feminist knowledge and invested affective labour in the mediation of neoliberal and neuroliberal cultures. The politics of representation – counting more women into neoliberal universities, as one class, is not, we conclude, a counter-normative force. We need to consider how to apply feminist knowledge for leading post-gender universities and imagining alternative futurities.

KEYWORDS:

• Finland
• affect
• feminist leadership
• higher education
• epistemic inclusion

Acknowledgments

We should like to thank the ten interview participants for their time, insights, and wisdom, and the University of Tampere, the Academy of Finland, and the University of Sussex for their contribution to funding this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We revised this article in the midst of the global Covid-19 pandemic. Finland had a female prime minister, Sanna Marin. She, along with other female heads of state, e.g., Taiwan’s Tsai Ing-wen; New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern; Germany’s Angela Merkel; and Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen, were widely acknowledged as being more effective at managing the virus and keeping mortality and infection rates low (Henley & Roy, 2020). This line of argumentation overlooked the political fabric of the countries led by women, and suggested that women were innately better suited to crisis management.

2 Docentship, or Dossenti in Finnish, is an academic title awarded by universities in Finland. The English equivalent would be Adjunct Professor. Being awarded docentship does not involve any salary or employment assurance, but it does enable applying for large project funding, acting as PI in such projects, and acting as an opponent for PhD theses.